Monthly Archives: November 2016

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During the 2016 election, Americans opened a public discourse that sparked new and old fears, evoked unsettling and painful emotions, and surfaced certain real and perceived divides. When elections center solutions in the background to highlight problems in the foreground, it can be distracting and confusing, for adults and kids alike. Post-election, often those intensities fade. But this time, parents may find themselves confronting sustained and sometimes increasing worry, in the emotions and experiences of their children and their children’s classmates. These are the times when parents consider how they will explore complex and potentially charged topics with their children and teens.

As parents examine their values and their hopes for their children in this post-election climate, it may be helpful to consider how to approach a topic that is as oft-used as it is misunderstood – racism.

What are we talking about when we talk to our children about racism?

And how do parents start the conversation?

When we talk to kids about racism, we are primarily talking about 3 things.

First, we are talking about history – things that happened in the past that are important to understand what is happening now and why it matters.

To illustrate the history of racism in America, some parents may find it helpful to review age-appropriate details. For example, teenagers may have knowledge of historical events like slavery and the civil rights movement. Starting with what they know, consider extending the conversation to other demonstrations of institutional racism like government-sanctioned red-lining practices that decreased the home values of people of color, particularly African Americans, and contributed to current racial wealth disparities in America. Or examine the implications of Japanese internment camps during WWII that used race and nationality to deny Japanese Americans their civil liberties. These events and the history they represent are the embers of old fires still kindling in our present and the more we understand them, the more we are equipped to recognize their reemergence.

Second, we are talking about feelings – the prejudiced assumptions and ideas about others based on race. When stated aloud, as a part of targeted comments or unintentionally as a part of repeated narratives, prejudiced feelings can result in trauma, stress, and anxiety for the people who become the butt of a hurtful joke or the demeaned character in a story. These types of one-on-one interactions highlight episodes of personally-mediated racism.

To help kids identify prejudice and its form of racism, parents may use children’s books to share helpful lessons. Some can be found here and here.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we are talking about actions – everyday choices, big and small, to treat people differently because of their race. This is called discrimination and it is powerful because it not only hurts people’s feelings, it can also make them sick.

Simply put, racism – like many of the “isms” that have been heightened by this recent election – is about exclusion and harms. That exclusion can happen at the lunch table just as much as it can happen through laws. And the resultant harms can range from emotions like embarrassment, humiliation, and shame to physical violence, psychological stress, poverty, and disease.

As kids come home crying or with troubling stories of what they’ve seen or heard, resist the urge to dismiss their emotions with avoidance or denial. Instead consider these helpful tips:

DON’T tell kids it is unconditionally going to be okay, because for children and families who stand to lose their health insurance, residence, or civil freedoms, it may not be.

DO offer reassurance by discussing and modeling how to unconditionally support and care for classmates and friends who may be facing unique worries and stress at this time.

DO put those conversations in an age-appropriate context that includes ways children and teens can stand up for peers when they witness their exclusion.

DON’T try to minimize a child’s fears by normalizing distressing language and behavior.

DO listen to their fears and talk about reasons for hope, including their ability to actively express empathy, support, and advocacy for peers whose fears may be different, more acute, imminent, or sustained.

These moments are opportunities to model engagement, tolerance, and compassion for children and teens trying to make sense of a world in which their values may be challenged, demeaned, or disregarded. Ultimately, what we are talking about when we talk to our kids about racism, is the type of person they can actively become.

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The president-elect’s victory, and the tacit validation of his divisive and dangerous rhetoric and policy proposals, challenges those who call themselves liberals to be the values they espouse. Until 2 weeks ago, those values came at little cost. Aside from the news you read, the company you keep, and the places you buy produce, the daily politics of American life were, for many, comfortably cosmetic and consumer-oriented – simple public identities crafted by the items you purchase, relationships you explore, and content you share online. Then, Americans elected a xenophobic candidate who ran on an openly Islamophobic platform and has since designated overtly racist, nationalist, sexist, and homophobic advisors and federal appointees.

This. Is. The. Wake. Up. Call.

I fear we are missing it.

Despite eruptions of private emotions, public protests, and hashtags du jour, in the short 11 days since the election, some have returned to their daily lives, unscathed, and continue their daily work, unchanged. Perhaps seeking emotional refuge from their liberal outbursts, they hasten calls for stability rather than quicken the pace of resistance. They find room to wait while the marginalized among us live under the threat of violence, displacement, internment, and the insidious affront to their rights and their America that is hate speech and hate crimes that go unacknowledged and unatoned. This form of liberalism is privilege incarnate. It is the white tears that dry quickly, the fickle fetish of media sensationalism, the limited attention that only spans the interests and people that look and feel like “us” or “them,” and the normalization of public exclusion in the most powerful democracy in the world.

There is literally no time to waste. And every moment a “liberal” person, organization, or institution spends calling for caution in place of critique, pause instead of preparation, and waiting as opposed to imminent action are lost opportunities to defend the values and people liberals’ claim to hold dear.

This includes hospitals, and other public entities erected in service of community. “Carry on” attitudes that simply re-assert an existing mission without delineating concrete plans to defend or extend that mission should allied populations be endangered, are frankly not enough. And should employees fall victim to local or federal aggression, they offer no protection at all. If progress relies on accurate recognition of the problems, “carry on” stances silence the uncomfortable realities, conversations, and sacrifices required to look those problems in the face.

It is not alarmist to get prepared. And that preparation entails mobilizing the volume of resources necessary to support a diverse set of populations who now worry for their safety and security in this country. If the urgency of that need is somehow lost on you, don’t hide behind your liberal leanings and co-opt progress.

To Plan:

Place those most affected in positions to advise and lead how organizations respond to new needs or evolving threats facing the populations it serves.

Anticipate the needs of clients or patients with intersecting identities and consider forming coalitions with organizations best equipped to serve needs that may fall outside given expertise or capacity.

Vulnerable populations can be employed in positions that offer the least schedule flexibility. Consider adjusting those constraints as needs to care for family may rival needs to be present in the workplace.

Consider a buddy system or a phone tree between employees to increase the visibility of those worried about their ability to get to and from work safely.

Consider creating a safe space for affected employees to seek emotional or legal counsel should the need arise.

Consider supporting organizations that champion the needs of the marginalized with donations or service, and if possible, reflect their needs in joint legislative agendas.

The challenge liberals are facing is a kind of active democracy many have never known and it may be painstaking and overwhelming. It is also a burden people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and other marginalized groups have carried, often silently and alone, for years, centuries, as the spaces to publicly express, wear, and own their person-hood is narrowed.

Vigilance is too often inherited through wounds endured. For those who now find themselves unaffected or disaffected, it is time to ask, how many wounds must be sustained for you to move from the waiting room to hold space for action?

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Every day since Tuesday feels like walking a plank. Stepping toward a jagged and uncertain future with hands bound by the votes of neighbors, friends even. How deep do these dark waters go? When no bridge spans the troubled reaches, where is the solace for what lies beyond the edge?

To those of you who are now, just 2 days later, shrugging your shoulders and saying, “It may not be that bad.” Or “Let’s wait and see what happens.”

Stop.

I get that perhaps you do not wake to the terror and nausea that I do. That you must not have felt personally accosted by the toxic insults that diminished your love, your color, your nationality, your body, your traditions, your abilities, your rights, your neighborhood, or your God. You must not have felt your physical safety threatened, trivialized, or commoditized for a political punchline. But the wounds I carry weren’t opened 2 days ago. These wounds predate the president-elect, but are pained all the more by his malicious campaign, growing crowd of supporters, and electoral win. That pain is inflicted on old scars, shared scars, some more vulnerable than others, and the process to heal them will require more than mere distance from Tuesday.

The 2016 election is personal. While we can await the policies and procedures that empower the president-elect and embolden the unveiled hatred of some unhooded supporters, the toll the weeks and months of unfettered attacks on American values, American people, and American diplomatic relations, has already begun.

It is here that I depart from calls for insta-unity.

To quiet the disquiet that illuminates the darkest recesses of America and Americans is to turn away from our problems at the moment they fully surface. No, the lines have been drawn. They are stark. They are real. And they must be confronted. While the unrepentant divisiveness of the republican nominee’s rhetoric and thin political strategies may have stoked an old fire of racial, patriarchal, gendered, economic insecurities – make no mistake about it, what is set aflame is the roof that covered existing, widening, engrossing tensions that divide America down the middle. And to reconcile those tensions we, you and I, must look them in the face and make some decisions. One decision was made on Tuesday. But more decisions are coming.

White people who call themselves allies, now is the time to do the work. And that work does not mean organizing black and brown people. It means talking to other white people. Go home, go to class, go to work, and have difficult conversations about what Tuesday means for many Americans. Look honestly at the rationalizations of “small government” idealism and “anti-establishment” deviance and explore what it means to prioritize those values above the safety and inclusion of people of color, homosexuals, transgender individuals, people with disabilities, women and particularly those who have suffered sexual harassment or assault, Muslims, immigrants and the wealth of diversity that calls America home. Examine how the freedom to vote on ideals when the rights of fellow and marginalized Americans are at stake, is a privilege that comes with responsibilities, the least of which is identifying as a liberal, or a conservative.

To republicans, especially those who depart from the president-elect’s divisive words and claims, your congressional and local power and proximity to constituents may be all that stands between some and their future. While Obamacare may be a contentious policy, its repeal without swift and comprehensive replacement of a structure to insure and assure Americans affordable access to baseline health services, will almost certainly result in rising ranks of uninsured, increased health disparities, and more untimely deaths. This is avoidable and should be prevented. Also, as immigration reform is likely to be an early priority of the incumbent administration, please deeply consider what the separation of American families, children from parents and siblings from caregivers, means for those who remain. Immigration is the foundation of this country. When the vote arises, we will call on you, republicans, to honor that value for all of us. More decisions will certainly come, but let us start there.

And lastly, to black women. To the black female voters, more than 90% of whom voted for Hillary Clinton. Thank you. I see you. You are the cornerstone of this democracy. You who labor and serve and nurture and endure, who have given from the depths of your womb and through the pain of your wounds. Thank you. You who stood in line without hearing a candidate utter the intersections of your lives, elevate your contributions to community, or value your consistent, historic presence at the polls as both patriot and rebel – ever challenging your nation to rise to its values. Thank you. This nation owes you great thanks.

And to all of us. We do this work for the children and youth who must live under the fruits or failures of our efforts. We do it so we can say and show what already made America great.

Adulthood Looms

Graduation!June 30th, 2013

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The opinions stated here only reflect mine and are not representative of any of the institutions I have attended or currently attend. Also, although I am a licensed physician, any generalized opinions I offer are not meant as medical advice to treat or advise patients. Medical decisions can only safely be made in consultation with a doctor you know and trust. Also, links to other websites do not imply that I endorse any of the views expressed there or products advertised there.